What's the darkest YA scene you've read?

MJRevell

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I want to know the scariest moments you've come across in YA fiction, and how far you're pushing it in your own work...
 

KateSmash

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The entirety of The Marbury Lens unsettled me. I don't think I could stomach much more than it. (So no Tender Morsels for Kate)

I, uh, don't push it very far in my own work? IDK, readers like to disagree sometimes (ok, a lot), but I don't see my own work as dark. Dark concepts, maybe, but I always end up writing about big heroes saving the day.

Though there was that one scene with a molt retractor ...
 

bethany

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Hmmm in my mind there is a huge difference between dark and scary. I think the scene in Knife of Never Letting Go where Todd kills the Spackle is really dark/disturbing.

I think all of the scenes in I Hunt Killers that refer to Jazz's mother and her uncertain fate are dark/disturbing.

However, these scenes didn't scare me.

The scariest scene (for me) was the scene in Living Dead Girl where Alice gets kidnapped, but that was because my little girl was going on a field trip the VERY NEXT DAY and I couldn't take off work to chaperone. Scared me to freaking death.
 

ellio

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Yeah I found various things in Living Dead Girl unsettling but most of all when she performs fellatio on the boy in the car. All the stuff with her kidnapper was hard, but the scene in the car described her as doing it because she knew how to, and having no emotional connection to the act. I just find the thought of girls performing sexual acts that are completely consensual but at the same time not really what they want to be doing extremely sad. Because its hard to tell a teenaged girl that she doesn't HAVE to do those things without sounding like youre shaming her, which then could have the adverse affect of making them feel dirty/guilty about it. It's just a whole vicious circle of breeding for negative attitudes towards sex which hits me in my gut.
 
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Maryn

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The ending of The Girl in the Box for me. I don't read a lot of YA since our kids outgrew it, but man, that was chilling.

Maryn, who likes dark
 

Becca C.

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Yeah, the scene in The Knife of Never Letting Go where Todd kills the Spackle. That was... horrible. Disturbing. Made me feel all kinds of freaked-out and sad and violated. Ugh. That's probably the worst I've read for gets-under-your-skin kind of disturbing.
 

WriterBN

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Yeah, the scene in The Knife of Never Letting Go where Todd kills the Spackle.

There were a lot of very disturbing scenes in the Chaos Walking series. Probably the most disturbing YA series I've read, and evidence of why Ness is such a brilliant author.
 

missesdash

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There's a scene where an entire family is murdered and baby's head is blown to bits in DEAD END. There is also a scene where a girl is raped (for like the third time in the freaking book), kills herself and then (spoilers) her boyfriend kills himself and it turns out she didn't actually die, so she comes to and then she gets murdered by a cop who was after them so that was pretty fucked up.
 

LadyA

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100% the ending of THE BUNKER DIARY by Kevin Brooks (spoilers from hereon in). It was described as 'Saw meets Big Brother' (UK TV series where people live together in a house for a few weeks, with cameras filming their every move) - the protag is a 17-yr-old boy who is abducted and waks up in a prison-like underground bunker with a little girl, and old man, and others. They're psychologically tortured and then starved to death in total darkness.
The bit that got to me the most was right at the end, after the little girl dies in the protag's arms, and he is so hungry/thirsty it is implied through his disoriented diary entry that he eats her. Then he dies.
It was so hopeless, bleak, that I had to give the book away, I couldn't even look at it without feeling seriously depressed.
 

ellio

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Can I derail the thread slightly and ask what redeemed all these books mentioned for you, or perhaps a better question; why do you think these dark scenes were needed? Because loads of these just sound like standard horror lit and I didn't think that was a big thing in YA.
 

rosiecotton

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The unwinding scene in UNWIND by Neil Shusterman. I read that scene, put down the book, and then stared at the wall for twenty minutes. Horrific, heartbreaking, sinister. It stayed with me for weeks.
 

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I can't really remember what the scariest scene I read in YA was and that makes me sad but I'm willing to go darkest darkness if that's where the story takes me. I can't do visceral 'blood and guts splattering to the floor' gratuitous visual squick though. I don't enjoy that kind of style. Also no rape or any sexual horror. Also, I'm not really into 'I'm a psycopath and I'm gunna keeeel yewwwww muahaha' type of thriller either. Also NO BAD THINGS HAPPENING TO ANIMALS.

Holy crap, my 'do not want' list is getting pretty long. I think I will stop now as I am reaching OT status pretty quickly here.
 

Becca C.

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Can I derail the thread slightly and ask what redeemed all these books mentioned for you, or perhaps a better question; why do you think these dark scenes were needed? Because loads of these just sound like standard horror lit and I didn't think that was a big thing in YA.

Well... THE KNIFE OF NEVER LETTING GO was pretty thrilling and suspenseful, so the reading experience was good, and it did a pretty great job of showing how some love can grow in a brutal world. I recognize how well-written it is -- but honestly, I don't think I'm ever going to read the other two books in the series, despite owning them. The brutality was a bit much for me.

Also... yeah, a bad thing happens to an animal in that book. I hate that, too.
 

lolchemist

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Well... THE KNIFE OF NEVER LETTING GO was pretty thrilling and suspenseful, so the reading experience was good, and it did a pretty great job of showing how some love can grow in a brutal world. I recognize how well-written it is -- but honestly, I don't think I'm ever going to read the other two books in the series, despite owning them. The brutality was a bit much for me.

Also... yeah, a bad thing happens to an animal in that book. I hate that, too.

Everything you wrote were literally my thoughts about this book, especially the bolded parts! The 1st book was well written and compelling enough to *earn* me finishing it even though I wasn't enjoying the world or setting but once I was done I was like NOPE NOPE NOPE to the sequels. I suffer from depression and anxiety in real life and even though the story was good everything was just too depressing to continue to go on. Even the promise of an eventual happy ending in book 3 just isn't good enough.

Maybe someday in the future when my emotional state isn't so down, I might give it another try.
 

Rhoda Nightingale

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The Monstrumologist by Rick Yancey. Literally the only dark YA I haven't had the stomach to finish.

ETA: Of the ones I've attempted thus far, I mean...
 

The_Ink_Goddess

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Can I derail the thread slightly and ask what redeemed all these books mentioned for you, or perhaps a better question; why do you think these dark scenes were needed? Because loads of these just sound like standard horror lit and I didn't think that was a big thing in YA.

I've read a lot of the books mentioned on this thread, and I would say, of those I've read, THE BUNKER DIARY (and, by the way, the implied cannibalism at the end would be my pick, like LadyA's) is the only one I'd consider 'horror' in a pure sense. DEAD END and LIVING DEAD GIRL are very dark contemporary, UNWIND is dystopian and CHAOS WALKING is this really odd fantasy/thriller/dystopian/sci-fi hybrid. I HUNT KILLERS is more like dark contemporary/crime. But it has shown up that a lot of books can have SCENES of horror without being classified as such. Horror is growing so maybe we'll see less of that?

But it also makes me question what we specifically find scary. LDG is extremely disturbing in places but I'll bet it wouldn't scare me the way it would the parent of a young child. If we widened this question to adult books, I might be tempted to include the flashback scenes of female disenfranchisement in THE HANDMAID'S TALE.
 

EMaree

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Well... THE KNIFE OF NEVER LETTING GO was pretty thrilling and suspenseful, so the reading experience was good, and it did a pretty great job of showing how some love can grow in a brutal world. I recognize how well-written it is -- but honestly, I don't think I'm ever going to read the other two books in the series, despite owning them. The brutality was a bit much for me.

Also... yeah, a bad thing happens to an animal in that book. I hate that, too.

Everything you wrote were literally my thoughts about this book, especially the bolded parts! The 1st book was well written and compelling enough to *earn* me finishing it even though I wasn't enjoying the world or setting but once I was done I was like NOPE NOPE NOPE to the sequels. I suffer from depression and anxiety in real life and even though the story was good everything was just too depressing to continue to go on. Even the promise of an eventual happy ending in book 3 just isn't good enough.

Maybe someday in the future when my emotional state isn't so down, I might give it another try.

THIS x2.

THE KNIFE OF NEVER LETTING GO was a good, gripping read, but I can't go back to it. Not after *that* part of the finale. (You know what part I mean.)
 

Taylor Kowalski

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Oh my goodness. My library copy of THE KNIFE OF NEVER LETTING GO (which I picked up on a whim) is burning a hole through my bag. You guys are making me really, really want to read it.
 

Krissy Reynolds

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The unwinding scene in UNWIND by Neil Shusterman. I read that scene, put down the book, and then stared at the wall for twenty minutes. Horrific, heartbreaking, sinister. It stayed with me for weeks.

That scene still is with me. It is probably one of the most impactful and disturbing scenes I've read.

I love that it is written so simply and not with a ton of details--I think the simplicity is what truly made it so disturbing.
 

chicgeek

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If we widened this question to adult books, I might be tempted to include the flashback scenes of female disenfranchisement in THE HANDMAID'S TALE.

Oh my god, the Handmaid's Tale. I'm still only halfway through the book, it terrifies me so. The only other time I've been so physically uncomfortable reading a book was reading 1984. It's that total lack of privacy, that invasion of self, that I find so frightening.

And yeah, the Unwinding Scene in "Unwind" stuck with me as well.

Did anyone else read the contemp YA book "Wintergirls"? That whole book had me twisting and cringing as the MC slowly starves herself. And when she describes how her best friend died... ugh.

As for my own book (YA Dystopian)... it's got a lot of dark stuff going on. My MC's a cutter, the villain is a sociopathic madwoman whose convinced everyone in her society that the only way to "ascend" (and leave the biosphere they've been forced to live in) is to commit mass suicide. There are cannibals running rampant in the sewers (and a scene where my MC is nearly killed by one and has to slit its throat, also a scene where she stumbles upon their lair full of dismembered corpses), there's an attempted rape scene, and there's the climax where the villain goes nuts and starts burning people alive.

I seriously never meant for it to get that dark. Just trying to stay true to the story as it comes to me...
 

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Living Dead Girl is the most disturbing book I've ever read. The Drowned Cities was a very dark read, too (but very good. Far more brutal than Ship Breaker).
 

rwm4768

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Yeah, I remember the unwinding scene to be quite distressing.

This thread makes me want to read The Knife of Never Letting Go. I like dark scenes. Really, I like anything that really gets to you emotionally.